The Unexpected Salami

by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

  I didn’t think much about Stuart’s death. In hindsight, it was a sad but apt conclusion for his lifestyle.

  But Colin was different. He was my closest friend overseas. Colin looked mighty hurt when I said I was leaving for New York. I tried to imagine the reaction if I had dragged Colin back home to the States. What if I brought him to the Levine Passover Seder or the Ganelli Easter Sunday Dinner? He’s thirty-two, works in a copy shop, and is a fine bass player. We have a lot in common; for example, our flatmate was murdered! And Colin gives an excellent back massage. Yeah, right. Like we would have lasted a day outside of our Melbourne bubble.

  Francis started cradling my hand and I felt a tad sick. I’d forgotten about him.

  “Rachel, I will be in Manhattan for a wedding in two months,” Francis smiled. “Can I stay with you?”

  “Sure, give me a call a couple of weeks before you leave Montreal.” I wrote my number, with a digit changed, on a napkin.

  “Please adjust your seats back up,” the steward said, collecting the last of the juice tumblers.

  We began our descent.

  Like a moron, I’d forgotten about the reversed seasons. It was thirty-six degrees Celsius when I left Melbourne, a scorcher of a departure day, and nearly as toasty when I poked my head out the sliding doors into the palm-treed LAX grounds during the four-hour wait for my connecting flight. At LaGuardia it was two inches of snow and counting. In my thigh-high cut-off jeans, I dashed down the airport loop to the shuttle bus, and then at Grand Central to a cab destined for my empty family apartment. The building, constructed on an angle, fills and towers over the block’s slender pie wedge of Greenwich Village. The lower-floor windows look directly into the stores across the street.

  “Your building looks paranoid,” the driver said with perfect diction. “That’s what they used to do. Buildings were designed to make tenants feel safe.” He stopped talking when I handed him a quarter for a tip.

  “You’re joking,” he said.

  “I’m sorry. I was living overseas and I’m out of money and I thought I’d have two dollars for you and taxi fares have gone up since I left.” I quickly closed the door in shame.

  My parents, true to their word, had left two days earlier for their Florida condo. There were messages blinking on the answering machine.

  “Sylvia? Virginia. I want to wish you and Joe a safe trip to Miami. I’ll check in on my niece, don’t you worry.” “Mom, it’s Frank—when is she coming? I think I’m not going to be able to meet her.” “Welcome back, baby—sorry the house is a sty—we’ll need you to ship the rest of the boxes UPS when you’re settled. Call me.” “Hi, Mrs. Ganelli—it’s Janet. Frieda told me that when she called Rachel a few days ago, Rachel said she was coming home—is this true? Could you call me at the Mayor’s Office for Film? 555-4641. They’ll page me. Thanks.” “Hiya Rachel, it’s Mom. Calling again to see if you’re back. Give us a call!”

  The family apartment reminded me of the cluttered Peabody Museum I’d visited in grade school as part of an overnight field trip to Boston. Mom and Dad had papers stacked on magazines stacked on mystery boxes—an abode where only a lifelong curator could have found a particular item in less than a day. The last time the apartment was my permanent address was when I was seventeen, ten years earlier.

  After staring out my parents’ sixth-floor kitchen window onto King Street, I entered the old room that I’d shared with my brother. When Frank’s voice started to change, the room had been cleaved down the middle by a metal room divider. My parents apparently had the divider removed while I was in Australia. It disoriented me to see that room opened up once more. I could see fragments of the masking tape we were never able to scrape off, browning on the floor. Until my mother found out about it, Frank charged me ten cents for each crossing over his tape line, even though the door was on his side of this first unofficial room divider.

  I started to pull boxes out of the closet and discovered a cache of comics remarkably well preserved in Zip-loc bags, each treasure documented on an enclosed index card. Frank had been brutal about what was drivel and what wasn’t. He spent his entire weekly five-dollar allowance on issues of Fantastic Four, Jack Kirby’s Forever People, Conan the Barbarian, Powerman, and Marvel Team-ups. “In Zip-locs, they’ll age better,” he’d said. With my three-dollar allowance, I bought Archie and Richie Rich comics, despite Frank’s moans of disbelief, and what’s more, stored them in an old pink doll box, sans Zip-loc. True to Frank’s prediction, they had yellowed in cruel air.

  An envelope taped to the back of the closet wall read, “Do not open until the year 2000.” The envelope glue was barely sticking; I extracted a slip of paper dated January 1, 1974. “I bet $10,000 that Frank Evan Ganelli will not shave his head bald on New Year’s, 2000.” I tried to recall the sincerity of an eight-year-old girl and her ten-year-old big brother. I put the envelope back in its sacred site with fresh Scotch tape. There were another eight years to forget about it.

  I rummaged a bit through the master bedroom, a not small thrill. I couldn’t recall a previous occasion affording such unchecked nosiness. Opening my parents’ file cabinet, I examined my birth certificate and my grandparents’ death certificates. I was really born and they were really dead. I fished out a manila envelope from the deepest recess of the cabinet, stuffed with Marilyn Monroe articles and the very first Playboy, with Marilyn Monroe on the cover. I tried to imagine my famously reserved father harboring a celebrity crush, fantasizing about the ultimate Other.

  I clicked on Geraldo. The change in accent shocked me. Americans seemed earnest and loud.

  Frank, who’d traveled throughout Europe after college, had warned me against condemning the United States when I returned. “Everyone,” he’d said, “goes through that stage, and it’s boring.” Still, there were no crass confession shows in privacy-conscious Australia, where the government doesn’t even release census records to genealogists.

  I didn’t feel like calling my parents yet. Jet-lagged, I succumbed to the couch in the living room.

  My mother woke me up around six P.M. “Rachel! Ah, baby, now I can sleep. Why didn’t you call? You’re home, away from that rock murder mishegoss. I’ve never heard of anything that crazy!”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Kiddo, we love you so much. You’re too smart a girl to get caught up with that scary element. Tell me about your flight.”

  2

  Colin: HOUSESHARE

  The more a guitar gets played the better it sounds. I don’t know the scientific reasons for this. The sound gets in the wood. Say you had a hundred new Fords from a factory. After ten years, each would have its problems—some in the boot, some on the axle. Same with a guitar. Every time the string vibrates, the wood vibrates. But the beauty of a guitar is that over the years it develops a warmth to it that a new guitar doesn’t have. Andy Summers always used a ’63 Telecaster, even when he was at the height of his career with the Police. I saw a photo of it in Musician. The paint’s chipped off, but he said in the interview that it sounds better every day. The only trouble is that you have to keep getting it fixed.

  It took two years to sink in that Rachel and I had a wild rapport going, a perfect timbre that comes with time. After I had spent months hanging out with her, the girls I met at gigs and parties seemed like space cadets. If I even shot the breeze with one of those tarts, Rachel would rail into me about my lack of self-respect. I knew she was jealous though, and it made me feel good.

  • • •

  I’d been away for the weekend; my Uncle Jack had remarried up in Swan Hill. By the time I returned, Phillip and Stuart had already selected Rachel for Simon’s old room. Phillip ran an over-the-top houseshare ad with the word abutting in it. I’d had to laugh. He wrote it with a thesaurus, the way he wrote his song lyrics. Rachel called it a Mary Poppins ad, which she said meant that its oddity was a magnet. It’s still in my black organizer:

  Financially sound, artistically and musically attuned f. 22–30 wan
ted to share with 3 m. musos in an only slightly dilapidated house. St. Kilda. 60pw. Working fireplace in bedroom, abutting trams, groovy shops. No New Agers. Phillip/Colin/Stuart 510.1070.

  I’d written the ad the time before, and we’d gotten Simon, who never took a shower. So I kept my mouth shut when I saw Phillip wanted a girl. Like he didn’t have enough girls from the shows. The “abutting” ad attracted sixty responses. We’d gotten three inquiries when I wrote mine—Simon, and two astrology nuts.

  When I rang from Swan Hill to check on the response, Phillip explained his decision not to wait until I returned to fill the room. He didn’t want to lose her.

  “She used to work at a New York radio station. Who knows who she knows? You’ll like her, Colin. She tells stupid stories like you.”

  “What does Stuart think?”

  “That he likes her smile. He’s not getting any these days. Probably wants to dip his wick.”

  The night I returned, Rachel had moved in only hours earlier. I went into the living room to say hello. This quirky, leggy Yank with a black ponytail was splayed out on the sofa like she owned the place. She looked so American in her jeans and T-shirt. Her eyes were deep brown and followed you everywhere, like Stuart’s. I had never met an American before, except for the odd tourist asking for street directions, and a wanker with a square American jaw who once needed blueprints “by yesterday” at the print shop. I couldn’t believe that she was going to live with us. She could have been a movie star the way I felt. Though I didn’t act that way of course.

  “G’day,” I said, “I hear you’re my new flatmate.”

  “Hi. I’m Rachel.”

  “Colin. Love your accent.”

  “You’re the one with the accent,” she teased. “That’s a movie line, I think. I can’t remember which one.”

  I thought of an anecdote that might sound half intellectual: when I was little, I’d believed the American accent was the TV accent (or the telly accent, as my family called it then), and that shows were made in in Australia. Hollywood, where they made the cowboy movies, would be up North maybe, near Brisbane and the Coral Reef. But one day when my family was watching a cop show, a news presenter had interrupted with word that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated, like his brother. Robert Kennedy was running for President of the United States of America. A diagram of Kennedy’s head was shown as was footage of him collapsed on the ground with blood streaming out of his ear. The news presenter had been handed an update: “Robert Kennedy, I’m told, won’t live.” My parents’ reactions and the tears of the people on the screen amazed me; Mum mistook my staring for terror. “Don’t worry Colin, it’s far away. It’s in America. It’s happening on another continent.” It was the first time I’d heard the word continent. I began to realize that Australian meant distance from power and for the most part, from cold-blooded violence.

  “How long have you been in Australia?” I said instead.

  “About three weeks. I stayed at a hostel for a week, and then I moved in with someone I met waitressing while I found a place.”

  That amazed me. I could never do that. Shift countries, get a job, get someone to let me use their house as a crash pad.

  “What are you reading?”

  “Some stories by T. Coraghessan Boyle. He’s pretty hilarious, ever read him?”

  T what? I hoped she didn’t see me redden. “No.”

  “I’ll lend you the book when I’m done.”

  “Great. Want to join me for tea?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll fix us some then.”

  “Thanks.”

  I went to cook the chops I’d just bought, and the mint peas in the freezer. It was odd that she didn’t even offer to help. So comfortable on her first day in a new house. An alien being. I brought out a plate for her.

  “Here’s your tea, dig in.”

  “Oh, thanks,” she said, looking baffled, “but weren’t you making tea? I ate dinner before with Phillip.”

  Tea is the Aussie word for dinner. I explained that to her. I felt like I was from the sticks or something. There she was from New York, and here I was offering her chops and mint peas when all she wanted was fucking Earl Grey. She offered to eat the meal, but I said don’t be silly and knocked on Stuart’s door to give it to him. Again, this was before he had a habit.

  In less than a year Stuart began seeing that tart Melissa Rizziola, a dancer and a junkie who frequented the Greyhound Pub. Melissa got him hooked up with a shady, drug-abusing crowd whose personal hygiene was more than a bit on the nose. The few times I met any of them over at our house, I disinfected the couch after they left. Not like the band scene is a hall of saints, but shit, we’d put out a bona fide album. We worked hard to have the little slice of the musical Melbourne pie we had. And the one unbreakable band rule was no drugs, with the exception of a little pot now and then. We weren’t Christian maniacs, but being in a band is a job.

  But it was a normal thing to do in the early days of knowing Stuart, giving him the leftover chops. He basically kept to himself outside of rehearsal. Stuart was someone I didn’t think about much.

  I read this exotic American’s T. Coraghessan Boyle book that next weekend—a funny writer but he’s a bit too much of a smart-arse for me—a couple of good stories. But I kept that to myself.

  “Tell me about your childhood,” she said later that week during a commercial. I didn’t think she really wanted to know anything as boring as that. “Where did you grow up?”

  “Seaford. It’s down the Peninsula.”

  “Is it a nice place?”

  “Not really,” I said. Phillip interrupted with a funny story about the captain of the ambulance corps who had a drinking problem. She left me alone.

  Not long after Robert Kennedy’s death we moved out to Seaford, a few kilometers from Frankston. Close to Melbourne, Frankston was a rough, small city, chockablock with working-class poms, English immigrants. Seaford was small, too, but a distinct step up to lower middle class. It was quieter and less developed, almost a country town. My mother’s big selling point to my father was the nearby beach. Aunty Grace and Uncle Patrick, parents of my cousins Liam and Anna, had moved to this outermost edge of suburbia when Uncle Patrick was offered a job managing one of the resort hotels further down the Mornington Peninsula. The local development was so recent that cows grazed in the field past the public golf course.

  Aunty Grace said she liked it, and furthermore the affordable house next door was up for sale. Mum convinced Dad to move from our flat in Richmond, even though he would now have to commute an hour to the clothing shop he managed in Melbourne. Dad had thought moving next door to Aunty Grace was rabbit warren-ish, and at times our part of the block did feel like one big house. This really good kid, Cormac Kennedy, and his mum and dad lived on the other side of us—far flung from the American breakout achievers of their family tree. Cormac was five when I moved to Seaford. He watched me from a go-cart his dad had built for him. There were a good three years before he would begin dying of leukemia, when he would give me his beloved Cadbury wrapper collection. Mr. Kennedy often claimed that he had the same great-great-grandfather as John Fitzgerald.

  Rachel grew up in the most exciting city on the planet. Why would she want to hear anything about my ho-hum childhood? I maybe even worshipped her that first month, especially her brains. Every now and then I identified another glitch in her personality, but it was inevitably minor, like the way she skimmed books she didn’t have the patience for. That really gave me the shits. The house was a five minute walk from the St. Kilda library. Rachel was always reading, or at least checking books out. She flipped through masterpieces like my mum did with those romance novels she bought in the supermarket. But with her in the house, I did read more than I ever had with Simon in that room, for what that’s worth. Rachel checked out Crime and Punishment during one of her “I’m slipping behind” fits. “A guilt literature moment,” she owned up a day later. “It’s too subtle for me, you’ll
get more out of it.” She was right. She had the attention span of a teenager. If she couldn’t finish a book in one or two sittings, she wouldn’t read it. She’d give it to me, The Snail. I’m no bloody Einstein but if I’m going to bother to read a book, it’s going to be a meaty one and I’m going to savor it like good wine. It took me forever to read Crime and Punishment, but I remember everything. Nothing happens for the first million pages, according to Rachel. But in my opinion it’s the lingering details that make it great. Raskolnikov is the main character, and Porfiry is the inspector who knows that Raskolnikov has committed a double murder. But Porfiry doesn’t have enough proof to dob him in. Porfiry uses reverse psychology, slowly closing in. He warns Raskolnikov that he knows he is guilty as fuck and tells him that he will surrender one day. His steadfastness drives Raskolnikov fucking crazy.

  The reason Rachel and I grew closer was that we had shopping and toilet duty together. Stuart had the rubbish and the sweeping, and Phillip washed the dishes and organized the rent. I thought for sure that Phillip and Rachel were getting it on. That first month, Phillip had her sipping the green tea his yoga teacher sold him and rubbing his pressure points, like the back of his ear and the two cavities in his neck. He once moaned so hard that his new girlfriend, Kerri, just through the door, thought they were having sex.

  Phillip and Rachel had both gone to uni to study film, and could trade annoying references. But when we were rolling the cart down the pasta aisle it came out that she didn’t think Phillip was all that bright. I was secretly relieved, although I also couldn’t believe that I had a daily relationship with a guy who wrote such bullshit lyrics. I enjoyed Phillip, but there’s no denying his lyrics were dated and rang hollow. I put my foot down once or twice, like when he used a rhyming dictionary to pair platypus with Oedipus. Even the band name was straight out of the eighties: the Tall Poppies. Everyone around this time had one-word names like Nirvana. Or over-the-top names like My Friend the Chocolate Cake.